I have the printer, now I want gold!!

July 18, 2007 5:05 AM

Is there anyway to get a gold text print from a colour laser printer?

So after my previous question, I bought the HP2605, and it's working well indeed, thanks mefi!
Now I want to stretch it! Is there anyway of printing gold or gold-ish text with it?

posted by MarvinJ to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

I like Laser Foil. It only requires a black and white laser printer.
posted by fatllama at 5:20 AM on July 18, 2007 [1 favorite]

That Laser Foil link looks cool! I had not heard of that.

If you don't want to go the foil route, maybe you can print a color chart of all the varieties of goldish colors and pick one that works best. Unfortunately, the closest you can come to gold is orange or yellowish. I use a $30,000 Xerox color copier/printer and have never gotten anything that truly looks gold. It's probably because our brains say gold=shiny, so non-shiny-gold=orange.
posted by The Deej at 6:16 AM on July 18, 2007

Didn't Alps make a printer that took color, black gold, silver and Pantone cartridges back in the day? (though that foil looks cool)
posted by clango at 6:59 AM on July 18, 2007

Clango, I had an Alps MD-5000 that had very good output and had foil cartridges that looked great, but it was a pain in the butt to use due to frequent jams, crappy software, and so on. Also very slow by today's standards. It was discontinued and even before then supplies were hard to come by. It was a design with a lot of potential, though; I have a color laser and photo inkjet now that can't do everything the MD-5000 could (when it worked).
posted by TedW at 7:10 AM on July 18, 2007

Laser foil works well, it is a very mature technology. The first time I used it was on an original Laser Jet. (Not II or 4 or something, just HP LaserJet)
posted by Mitheral at 9:37 AM on July 18, 2007